Design and Verification of a Hybrid Multi-Beamforming system for SKA MFAA

A broadband hybrid muti-beamforming system applicable to SKA Mid-Frequency Aperture Array is presented in this paper. The hybrid beamforming system adopts a two-stage architecture that combines analog and digital beamforming. The analogue beamforming subsystem is able to provide a 16-element tile with 2~16 simultaneous beams covering ±45° spatial area and a flexible beam-selection capability by using a true-time delay and chessboard switching structure. The second-stage beamforming then produces beams in a full digital way within each input analog beam by CTPM that implements analog to digital converting, channelizer and digital beamforming.